Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute public talk at Buddha House in Adelaide, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a guided loving-kindness meditation — moving from self-acceptance through friend, stranger, and adversary outward to all living beings. The main theme, titled “A Matter of Balance,” argues that chasing external fixes (possessions, status, relationships) to solve internal problems is like turning up music to drown out noise: we grow progressively numb, reaching what Dostoyevsky calls “the inability to love.” He identifies two reasons to seek internal methods instead: the pervasiveness of suffering, and conscience’s quiet insistence that we can be more — illustrated by Don Juan’s image of a dog barking alone in the night, evoking lives that are “not altogether miserable, but hot and dull and uncomfortable.” A personal narrative about moving from conformist Ohio to California and eventually to Buddhist practice anchors the abstract arguments, and a William Blake quotation frames the closing point that attitude, not circumstance, determines whether the world brings happiness or suffering. Suited to general audiences with no prior Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 1988 04 10 The Path to Enlightenment 1.mp3
UUID: 9023edeb-0f07-4dee-880a-eecd498bd612
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Public talks 1988-2010 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-04-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.5 minutes
Words: ~4,743
I’d like to welcome you to Buddha House. My name is Jampa. I’ve been here for about eight months in Australia, in Adelaide. I’m going to give a talk entitled A Matter of Balance. I would like to just take a few minutes initially to do a short meditation.
A meditation on loving kindness. Sort of to not only to help develop our mind but to set the mood for what I’m going to say. Sometimes it’s called metta, metta bhavana, metta meditation. But it’s simply developing, fostering loving kindness, not only for others but also for ourselves. Getting to like ourselves.
So we’re going to use a lot of words. Obviously the words I love you etc. Are not love. Love is a state of mind. It’s beyond words.
But we can use these words to help us induce states of mind, skillful states of mind. They’re like fingers pointing, like a finger pointing to the moon. We don’t look at the finger, we look at where the finger is pointing. But we can use words. So we’re going to use words in order to help us develop these positive states of mind, caring and states of mind of concerning ourselves with others’ welfare and also ourselves.
So if you’re comfortable, if you can, a reasonably straight back, but don’t strain yourself. It’ll take about ten minutes. Think about your own problems, difficulties, dissatisfaction. And the fact that you want to be happy. No matter what you’ve done in the past, no matter what mistakes, you can simply regret them and determine not to repeat them again in the future.
You can begin again. No matter what conception you may have of yourself, no matter what identity you may hold to, you can change. You can be anything that you want to be. You can begin again. Before the present, we have to accept ourselves, both the good and the bad.
Become friends with ourselves. Quit torturing ourselves and be gentle with ourselves and wish ourselves well. Simply wish yourself happiness. May I be happy, May I grow? May I be well?
Drift positive feelings towards yourself. Now think of someone that you like, that you love, the same sex. Imagine that person in front of you. Feel that they’re in front of you. And think about how much they make you happy, about all the occasions that they brought you joy and satisfaction.
Simply radiate out the natural positive feelings which arise, wishing them happy, making them happy. You have everything that you desire and all good things come to you. The natural feelings that arise is radiate up and direct them towards this person you care for. Now think of someone you neither like or dislike, a stranger. Someone for whom you have feelings of indifference.
Imagine that person in front of you. I want to try to go beneath the superficial appearances that we usually cling to. Appearances of sex or age, beauty, color, appearances of economic, status, education, personality, intelligence. See deep down into that person. There’s someone there just like yourself who wants happiness and doesn’t want to suffer.
There’s no difference. And just as we wish our own self happiness, we have to begin to wish this person happiness because how we feel about that person deep down is very much a reflection about how we really feel about ourselves. To radiate that positive feelings towards this. Now think of someone who disturbs your mind, that you have problems with an enemy. Imagine that person in front of you.
This person wants happiness and doesn’t want to suffer just like yourself. Perhaps their method of finding happiness has come into conflict with your method of finding happiness. It’s just a matter of conflicts of interest, yours and theirs. You’ve hurt others in the past either intentionally or unintentionally to find the happiness that you were looking for and now this person has done the same to you. So if we’re ever going to forgive ourselves for the hurt we’ve caused others, we have to begin to forgive this person for the hurt they caused us.
Just for the moment, set aside your hurt and your grudge, your anger, and see what someone exactly like yourself, alone, confused, and trying the best they can to find some happiness in their lives and get rid of their suffering just like yourself and wish them happiness. Imagine all four of these people together, yourself and these three others. And try to see the essence of each of them. They all equally want happiness. They all equally don’t want to suffer.
There’s no difference whatsoever. And seeing this essence of each radiate that positive feeling equally to all four without any bias, without any prejudice, without feeling closer to someone distant from others. Who are all here equally. People looking for some type of real happiness, with some method to find satisfaction and fulfillment, taking responsibility for their lives. May you be happy.
May you find everything that you’re looking for. To radiate out positive feelings to everyone in the room. And everyone on the block, whatever they’re doing, whatever they’re saying, watching television, preparing a meal, eating, sleeping, everything that they’re doing, they’re doing in order to find happiness, To really radiate out positive feelings to everyone on the block. Expanding out further to all of Adelaide, people in their cars and buses, people walking on the street, their homes. Radiating out positive feelings to Perth, Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, whole part of the entire country.
Extending out further. Reaching out further. New Zealand. Enveloping the whole world in your heart, in your caring, in concern, all the people, black, white, red, yellow, all the animals, insects, everything that lives. Further.
Until finally, without any boundaries, without any center, pervading all of space. I wish, may all We want to talk about a matter of balance. It’s a balance between internal methods, psychological methods, spiritual methods, whatever we want to call them, and external methods, materialistic methods. Solving external problems with external methods, internal problems with internal methods, being able to distinguish between the two, and being able to understand how the various methods are applicable. And therefore, we no longer have the frustrations and disappointments of trying to use methods which are inappropriate to solving our problems, to finding the internal solutions to internal problems.
I’m going to talk very much like I usually do in the sense that my friends. You know, the Dalai Lama, he once said when he met a group in Europe on a tour, he said, I feel like I’ve just come home, when he met this group. There was a group he had never met before. He had never seen probably any of those persons that were gathered. So what did he mean?
Coming home, like meeting old friends. It’s very much as in the case of this meditation. You know, we all have our very different histories. We all have different bodies, males and females. Some are prettier than others, and some are older than others.
But essentially, if we look within us all, we’re all exactly the same. You know, everyone here, including myself, want happiness. And everyone here doesn’t want to suffer. They want to go beyond their suffering. So in that sense, you know, it may sound romantic, it may sound idealistic, but we’re all very much brothers and sisters in this in this in that we’re all joined together in looking for a way to go beyond our suffering and to find happiness that we’re all looking for.
So I’m just going to share some ideas with you. And more than that, most of them aren’t even my own ideas. Perhaps none of them are. I’m going to share a lot of wisdom that I’ve heard and that I’ve read. And perhaps it will have some meaning for you and some inspiration.
Perhaps you’ll gain some understanding of the situation that we’re in as I felt I have. You know, generally, we’re all very much running. Running away from our difficulties, our problems. We in Buddhist terms, we call this going for refuge, but it doesn’t matter what we call it. We’re running towards something, something that we think is going to bring us the happiness that we’re all seeking, something which is going to ease the pain.
We run to other people, to money, to jobs, status, material possessions, whatever, you know, boats, cars, hobbies. You know, we can even run to religion. But we have to begin to check up and see whether all this running is going for refuge to these various objects. It’s actually working. Are we finding happiness?
Is it solving our problem? In the course of running, it’s like, you know, constantly turning up the volume of music in order to drown out some disturbing noise. We have to keep running faster, we have to keep turning the volume higher and higher. But the problem is that the faster we run, the more material possessions that we seek to accumulate in the course of solving our problems, the more people we use as objects, more the material word we seek to manipulate, more and more insensitive we become. Ultimately, we become something out of stone.
You know, if you turn up the volume on your stereo high enough, pretty soon you’ll go deaf. You can’t you won’t be able to hear at all. And likewise, we become more and more insensitive until we don’t know what we feel any longer. We don’t know how to solve our problems or what are our problems to begin with. They become very insensitive.
Now it may become may be alright in some ways to become a stone. A stone doesn’t feel any pain, but also a stone doesn’t feel any love. And Dostoyevsky in a book called Brothers Karamazov, he was talking he was one of the characters, a father, a monk who was dying. He had a number of his brother monks who were gathered around him and he said, brothers and teachers, I ask you, what is hell? I say it is the inability to love.
So as we run faster and faster, as we become more and more insensitive, we may in fact numb ourselves, become insensitive to a great deal of our suffering through the cultivated lack of awareness. But this also becomes counterproductive in the end, in that we’re unable to actually feel anything anymore, including love. And probably without love, life becomes rather meaningless, pointless experience of just waiting till death comes to release you. So we need some real methods to work with our real problem. We need internal methods to work with our internal problems and to be able to distinguish between internal and external problems in order to apply the appropriate antidote.
Now working with the various methods, you know, there are two possibilities. There are that we practice Dharma and we practice materialistic means to solve other problems. Even those who take up the practice of Dharma treat it again as another material means. And we can call it spiritual materialism. It simply becomes another article amongst their many articles which they use in order to divert themselves from their own problems.
By dharma, I mean those methods or techniques which we can use to eliminate our internal problems, internal methods to solve internal problems. You know, these problems we can classify classify as negative states of mind. For example, desire, hatred, laziness, jealousy, you know, all these negative states of mind, which perhaps up until now haven’t even been considered negative. So we can look at the various states of mind such as dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, and where are all these stemming from. And I think if we check up, we can begin to see that they’re all associated with negative states of mind.
So we’re talking about using some method. We call this method dharma. We can call it a spiritual technique, a psychological technique. It doesn’t matter what we call it. But it’s something to do with working with our attitude of mind rather than consistently trying to manipulate the outside world, people, and articles within it as a means to find the happiness that we’re looking for.
Internal methods to solve internal problems. And we do have a whole array of problems. Some of them external. You know, if you’re hungry, there’s no sense in reading a scriptural text. The best thing to do is go fix a meal and solve your problem with food.
That’s an appropriate method to solve that problem. But why practice? You know, why practice Dharma in general? I think there are two reasons. The religion that we get acquainted with from outside, from books of scripture, can in no way become our own religion.
Its association with us is only a matter of habit. To unfold one’s religion within oneself is a lifelong aspiration of every human soul. It has its birth in acute suffering. So this is the first reason to practice Dharma, suffering. We have to be willing to admit it, and we have to be willing to confront it.
Not only confront it, but to cultivate an awareness of how pervasive it actually is in our lives, all its multifarious forms, not just the gross sufferings which we’re usually aware of, but they’re very subtle that we don’t even realize now are suffering. In fact, a great deal of what we call pleasure is in fact simply a mild form of suffering. You know, for example, if there’s some there’s an idiot standing sitting in the corner. He’s pounding himself over the head with a hammer. And the man walks up and said, you know, why are you hitting yourself over the head with a hammer?
And he said, because it feels so good when I stop. That is very much an example of most of our pleasure. Simply the cessation of a stronger type of suffering. But in and of itself, it’s not really pleasure. It’s not really peace.
But that’s all we know up till now, so we call it pleasure for lack of a better understanding. So the first reason to practice Dharma is simply the fact of suffering and the fact that we don’t want to suffer. There’s no one in this room who wants to suffer, and even a masochist doesn’t want to suffer. For him, causing, going through this process of inflicting these tortures on on himself. That’s his form of pleasure.
He conceives of it as pleasure. Conscience demands to be heard. Such hearing is more than passive receptivity. It implies a response. Hearing the voice of conscience, man can respond by running away obedient to the call of temptation, or he can summon the strength to place himself under his own truth, which he calls conscience.
The voice of conscience discloses to man his essential being. The authentic response to such a disclosure is to resolve to be oneself in the face of the essential precariousness and groundlessness of human existence. This is inarticulate whispering of our heart. And even amongst all the noise that we create, all the running, occasionally between the two breaking waves of the sea, there’s some whispering which is saying that we can be more than what we are now, that we can it’s our our own sanity, our own basic goodness seeking to break through, our own conscience which is calling us from this state of confusion, from this state of dissatisfaction to something more in life. It’s calling it to be nothing more than yourself, but this is quite a heroic battle.
To be no one but yourself in a world within night and day trying to make you everyone else is the hardest battle we have to fight, and we have to fight at night and day. These are the two reasons we practice Dharma. One is suffering, and the other is to be everything that we can be, to answer these inarticulated whisperings of our own heart, which we all experience, either lesser or greater from time to time. So in one case, it’s suffering which is pushing us. It is light, truth, whatever which is drawing us towards seeking a new way, a new type of life.
Taking a path. Years ago, I told you that in his day to day life a warrior chooses to follow the path with heart. It is the consistent choice of the path heart which makes a warrior different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace, a great pleasure traversing its length. Our heart’s inmost desire, and in it, fulfilling that finding some peace within ourselves.
It’s a very good description of what most of our lives are like. It’s by Don Juan. Don Juan was a Yaqui Indian who lived in northern Mexico, and he was just more or less a peasant, apparently very illiterate, very poor. But in fact, he was a man of wisdom. And he’s talking to his student disciple, Carlos Castanada, who wrote this series of books.
Carlos Castanada is a PhD, at this time PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Southern California. He thinks he knows it all. And he and Don Juan are standing out in the desert on a plateau and evening is coming. It’s very quiet, very desolate area. He paused.
Don Juan is talking to Carlos Castaneda. He paused. The silence around us was frightening. The wind hissed softly, and then I heard the distant barking of a lone dog. Listen to that barking, Don Juan went on.
That is the way my beloved Earth is helping me to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. We were quiet for a moment. The barking of that lone dog was so sad, and the stillness around us so intense that I experienced a numbing anguish. It made me think of my own life, my sadness, my not knowing where to go, what to do.
That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man, Don Juan said. It comes from a house in that valley towards the south. A man is shouting to his dog since they are companion slaves for life. His sadness, his boredom, he’s begging his death to come and release him from the dull and dreary chains of life. Don Juan’s words had cut a most disturbing line in me.
I felt he was speaking directly to me. That barking and the loneliness it creates speaks of the feelings of men, he went on. Men for whom an entire life was like a Sunday afternoon, an afternoon which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go or what to do.
That afternoon left them with only the memory of petty annoyances and tedium. And then suddenly, it was over. It was already night. Not knowing where to go, quite what to do. You know, it’s not altogether miserable, is it?
We’re not basket cases. We’re not rolling on the ground in pain. We’re not always depressed. But somehow, since there’s always these petty annoyances, life can be rather tedious and boring. So sometimes, you know, we grow tired of our own inauthentic existence, of our own hypocrisy, of our own pretense.
And we want to be real. We want to find something real. We get tired of not knowing exactly what to do or where to go, never feeling quite content, satisfied, fulfilled. This can be seen as a call of basic sanity, not being able to be content. It’s actually a very positive state.
Confusion is a sign of wisdom. If we’re aware of our own confusion, if we become aware of our own discontent, of our own needing to go beyond the level that we’re at, if we aren’t quite as numb as most, if we’re willing to cultivate the awareness and confront our problems, then all this, all our suffering, all our disappointment become meaningful, purposeful. They are a way to wisdom to actualize our our own basic sanity, to become healthy, happy human beings, which is what we all want to be. This is our burden nature, Christ nature, whatever. It doesn’t matter what we call it.
The longing to lay the burden of ego down. We want to find a way, a method, to become authentic, to find fulfillment, meaning to go beyond our suffering, to be happy. But there’s no certain way that exists permanently. There’s no way set up for us. Moment after moment, we have to find our own way, Some ideal perfection or some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way for us.
Each of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you understand nothing. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.
And when we talk about Dharma, when we talk about studying the Dharma, we’re talking about studying yourself. When we talk about practicing the Dharma, we’re talking about taking everything that you learn from studying yourself and applying it to your own life. This is the real practice of Dharma. Comes from within. So ultimately, we’re not practicing the Dharma, not making use of material methods, psychological methods to please anyone.
We’re not trying to please our friends, our parents, our family. We’re not trying to please the Buddhas, our teachers, Jesus Christ. We’re just trying to become whole, healthy, happy human beings. And the word whole, holistic, comes from the word holy. It’s the same word to be whole, not to be split off in parts of ourselves any longer.
It’s not so much that we’re seeking to perform perfect actions in a perfect world, but just appropriate actions in an imperfect world. Sometimes it’s not a very pretty world. We can’t change the world, but we can change our attitude and how we relate with that world. And in doing that, we’re going a very long way to bringing about a positive change in the world. So we’re trying to appease this inmost desire to lay down the burden of ego, the burden of ignorance, the burden of all the various afflictive emotions of desire, hatred, miserliness, spite, jealousy.
I remember I lived I grew up in Ohio, in the United States. It’s a very it’s a Midwestern state. It has very more or less conservative value. There’s not much going on, at least in my group that I grew up in. Intellectually, spiritually, there are no there’s no stimulus.
So when people used to talk and say, you know, I wanna be free from all the pressures of society, I used to wonder, I don’t I don’t quite understand that. Don’t feel any pressure. You know? I don’t feel like society is forcing me to be any particular way, to do anything in particular. But then eventually, for one reason or another, I left Ohio and I went to California.
And there was a new attitude. People with different values. There was a great deal of stimulation. And I began see that, in fact, all my values, all my goals, what I felt important, was being completely shaped by my society, by those my my group, those around me. And I determined I wanted to get free of that.
I wanted to create my own values, my own goal. So that was very that was very good. That was all fine and wonderful. So I grew a long beard and long hair, and I went out and I lived in the country in order to be free. But I began to see I still wasn’t free because I got angry at people when I really didn’t want to be angry.
And I was attached to people, and it hurt. And I didn’t want to be attached, but I I couldn’t go beyond that. I was under the control of these various afflictive emotions. So I began to see if I really wanted to be free. I know that only had to be free from the values of my peer groups from society, determine my own values rather than simply having reactive values, reacting, to have developed creative values out of my own principles, but also I had to go beyond my own mind, my own afflictive emotions, go beyond desire, hatred, ignorance, if I really wanted to be free.
So I I began to set out on that journey, an inner journey toward freedom. But there’s another freedom which I’ve I’ve become aware of. One can be enslaved by virtue. Any type of compulsive reoccurring pattern is is unfreedom. So then as a result, I wanna be completely free, not only from society, not only from afflictive emotions, but from ego altogether, which is essentially what we mean when we talk about these reoccurring compulsive patterns, which we live within this fantasy world that we exist in, wanting to go beyond altogether.
And this, I think, is real freedom. I’m not sure if there’s anything beyond this. Maybe someday I’ll discover there’s another freedom that could be won. I don’t know. And we could talk about what is the way of practice, you know, if we develop some determination to practice an inner method, begin to reorientate ourselves.
Up to now we’ve more or less seen, had the basic belief, the idea that if only I can manipulate the world, that is external environment, and the people therein, if I can only arrange them in certain desirable preconceived patterns, the people, job, material possessions. If I can get them all exactly where I want them, I’ll be happy. No doubt. So we keep trying. We keep trying.
And we get that degree that we thought was gonna bring us happiness. When we get that job, we get that car, we get the new wife, or we get the new husband, and it just doesn’t quite bring us happiness we had thought it was. But there was it wasn’t quite the right job. If If I had found really the right job, then it would have brought me to happiness. As it turned out, this wasn’t quite the job I thought it would be or this wasn’t quite the house I thought it would be.
Or this boat, well, there’s a bigger boat that if I had that boat and our whole life is filled with excuses of why we achieve our goals and they don’t bring us happiness, but we’re not going to confront the basic issue is that they’re never going to bring us happiness no matter what we may have achieved. It’s our basic attitude towards the various objects and the various people around us. William Blake said, the mind in its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. The various people, the various things around us are, like, are neutral in a way in a way. It’s like a knife.
A knife in the hand of a thief, of a murderer is very harmful. It can cause a great deal of pain. That same knife in the hand of a surgeon can be very beneficial. It can be life saving. It can bring great happiness.
So all the various people around us, all the various people that we come in contact with, how we relate with them is going to determine whether they bring us happiness or whether they bring us suffering or whether it’s just indifference. And we pass like riding a train at night passing through the countryside. It depends upon our attitude, our skill in relating to these various objects and people. So we begin first to differentiate between using external methods external problems internal methods to solve internal problems. If we’re hungry, we eat.
If we’re cold, we put on warm clothing.